An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Lois Weiner in Monthly Review on Social Justice Teacher Unionism

When “Teachers Want What Children Need”: Reconciling Tensions in Teachers’ Work and Teacher Unionism :: Monthly Review

Lois Weiner more on Education , Labor

Lois Weiner is a member of the New Politics
editorial board and is Professor of Education at New Jersey City
University, where she coordinates a graduate program for experienced
teachers. Her newest book, The Future of our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice, explains why and how teachers need to transform their unions to save public education.

“Teachers want what children need—or do they?” Questioning—and
rejecting—the slogan used by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
to fight for collective bargaining in the 1960s, David K. Cohen, a
contributor to Socialist Revolution, in 1969 dismissed the progressive potential of teachers’ unions.1
This article revisits the AFT’s slogan and Cohen’s question, examining
tensions between “what teachers want” and “what children need.” The
history of U.S. teacher unionism supports the argument that when
teachers’ unions adopt a “social movement” orientation and press against
the confines of the scope of bargaining embedded in
collective-bargaining agreements, the unions minimize tensions between
teachers’ rights to organize as workers in defense of their material
interests and the unique political and social responsibilities of their
work.
Though not apparent from either the capitalist mass media or many
critiques of what has come to be called “corporate school reform,” the
fate of the world’s children depends in great part on resistance from
teachers and their unions. We in the United States are experiencing a
version of a global project that financial and political elites began
forty years ago when they imposed school reform on Latin America,
Africa, and Asia, first under brutal military dictatorships supported by
U.S. imperialism and then as a quid pro quo for economic aid. Though
well-documented by scholars and activists in the global South, the
project (and resistance to it) is still not well-known in this country.2
Specifics differ from one country to another, yet its program has the
same footprint and purpose of making schools fit neoliberalism’s vision
of what the world needs: vocationalization of schooling, privatization
of the educational sector, and deprofessionalization of teaching. All of
this is tied to reliance on standardized tests as the exclusive measure
of students, teachers, and schools.3
The powerful elites who share information and policies across
international borders understand (unfortunately, better than do most
teachers) that despite their all-too-glaring problems, teachers’ unions
are the main impediment to the full realization of the neoliberal
project. As is true for labor unions generally, teacher unionism’s
principles of collective action and solidarity contradict
neoliberalism’s key premises—individual initiative and competition.
Neoliberalism pushes a “survival of the fittest” mentality. Labor unions
presume people have to work together to protect their common interests.
Another reason unions are a threat is that they can exercise institutional
power: as organizations they have legal rights; because of their
institutional roots, they are a stable force; and they are able to draw
on membership dues, giving them a regular source of income. These
characteristics give teachers’ unions an organizational capacity seldom
acquired by advocacy groups or parents, who generally graduate from
activity in schools along with their children. Yet, the very factors
that make unions stable and potentially powerful also induce hierarchy
and conservatism. Neither unions as organizations nor union members as
individuals are immune to prejudices that infect a society, even when
these prejudices contradict the union’s premises of equality in the
workplace.
Though the popular media cast teachers’ unions as powerful, the
unions are more often than not weak where it counts most, at the school
site. Union officials and staff are often disoriented and confused. The
well-orchestrated, extravagantly financed anti-teacher and
anti-teachers’ union propaganda campaign has greatly undercut the
credibility of unions and even the idea of teacher unionism, even among
teachers. Unfortunately, teachers’ unions have disarmed themselves in
combating their delegitimation because of their embrace of the
“business” or “service” model of union organization. This model,
dominant for decades in U.S. unions, configures them as a business that
exists to provide services to members, including lower rates for auto
insurance, benefits from a welfare fund, pension advice, negotiating a
contract, and perhaps filing a grievance. Officers and staff make
decisions on the members’ behalf. Other than voting on a contract and
electing officers every few years, members are passive. They are obliged
only to pay dues and accept the leadership’s expertise. Because the
service model is predicated on the members relying on officials,
participation is minimal, and so leaders easily evolve into a
clique—often one that is defensive and insular.
In response to what was, in retrospect, the first iteration of the
neoliberal education project in 1992, liberal academics, progressives,
education activists, and some union officials argued that teachers’
unions should respond to the calls for “excellence” and “accountability”
in education by spurning stances that made them resemble “industrial
unions.” Teachers’ unions, they argued, needed to be more conciliatory
about changes to schools that would benefit students. One camp,
advocates of “professional unionism,” advocated eliminating collective
bargaining agreements, replacing them with “trust agreements,” in order
to jettison the contentiousness of labor-management struggle. Teachers
should be professionals who assumed responsibility for educational
outcomes.4
Another segment of teacher activists argued for “social justice teacher
unionism” to replace the model of industrial unionism that had
dominated the education sector.5
Unfortunately, progressives who endorsed the “new teacher unionism”
forfeited their credibility among rank-and-file teachers who looked to
their union to protect their interests on the job—in the schools.
Moreover, advocates of social justice teacher unionism were often
unclear about how their vision differed from that of the new teacher
unionism and thought the unions had to jettison hard-fought contract
protections to improve educational outcomes. While many U.S. education
activists who advocated social justice teacher unionism hoped to build
support for their unions among parents and community, they
underestimated the peril of inviting into education the kind of
management-labor collaboration being heralded in private industry.6
In contracts and trust agreements, unions ceded vital job protections,
like seniority, for salary increases. Peer-evaluation schemes and new
salary schedules that created status inequalities among teachers by
creating “master teachers” gave teachers responsibility for school
outcomes without authority for deciding the most fundamental aspects of
school life. Ironically, the reforms progressive activists pressed the
union to accept in the name of improving school outcomes opened the door
to a work culture that assumes teachers would be on-call seven days a
week, fourteen hours a day. Neoliberalism now insists on this school
culture, which is lauded as essential to boosting students’ achievement.

Another limitation of social justice teacher unionism in the United
States was its unwillingness to address how the diminution of teacher
union power related to the atrophy of union internal life, in particular
the absence of vibrant democracy. This limitation was illustrated by
TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network), an alliance of teacher union
officers in both the National Education Association (NEA) and American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) who presented themselves as advocates of
progressive education reform.7
Canadian researcher Stephanie Ross observes that while a union that
states a commitment to social justice “may mobilize members, they can do
so in conditions largely defined by leaders…[that]
can be easily accommodated within and could even reinforce top-down
practices.” She notes that writers like Sam Gindin, Kim Moody, Michael
Eisenscher, and Christopher Schenk “all make a distinction between
mobilizational and democratizing approaches to union renewal, and in
particular, how tactics are framed and utilized. They all suggest a
variant of social unionism—most often referred to as social movement
unionism—which combines an anti-economistic, anti-sectionalist, and
transformative vision with new mobilizing repertoires and organizational
forms. Here workers don’t just ‘participate’: they ‘actively lead’ and
have democratic control over ‘the fight for everything that affects
working people’ in their union, their communities and their country.”8
Ross indicates that in categorizing unions, it is essential to look
at both a union’s stated purposes and the way it operationalizes those
goals—looking beyond labels to actions. So, for example, we can see that
while the British Colombia Teachers Federation calls itself a social
justice union, it resembles much more closely the social movement
teachers’ union that Ross describes.

Social Movement Teacher Unionism

Using the distinction Ross makes, I suggest that the term social
movement unionism clarifies how the organizational form of the union (as
a social movement) relates to the positions it takes (defense of social
justice). Social movement unionism casts the union’s strength as a
function of its ability to mobilize its members to struggle on their own
behalf and to join, as an ally, with other social movements that aim to
make our society more just and equal. Union power comes from the
bottom-up, as it does in social movements. Members’ self-interest is
defined broadly, as much more than immediate economic and contractual
concerns. The union struggles for its members’ stake in creating a more
democratic, equitable society, and the union allies itself with other
movements that are working for social justice, peace, and equality.
Though elements of the social movement unionism I propose are new,
many were present in teacher unionism’s birth in Chicago in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. The movement’s most prominent
spokesperson was Margaret Haley, an elementary school teacher and
socialist, who had strong ties to socialists in the AFL, activists in
the suffrage movement, and progressive educational reformers, most
notably John Dewey and school superintendent Ella Flagg Young.9
The movement she was instrumental in organizing fought for the economic
interests of teachers, embedding these demands for higher salary,
pensions, and professional authority in a political and social program
that aimed to democratize the schools and win economic and political
emancipation for working people. With John Dewey, Haley advocated the
centrality of public education and a professional teaching force in
schooling citizens for a democracy.10
The Chicago union, Local 1 of the AFT, initiated militant campaigns to
restore funding for public schools by taxing the corporations.
However, as was true of the union’s allies in organized labor, even
among socialists, teacher unionism was blind to the injustice of racial
segregation and inequality within both education and the society at
large.11
Rereading Haley’s speech, “Why Teachers Should Organize,” with our
understanding of the union’s acceptance of racial inequality complicates
the claims she makes for the absolute correspondence between the needs
of the teacher and the child. Haley first explains, “There is no
possible conflict between the interest of the child and the interest of
the teacher….
For both the child and the teacher freedom is the condition of
development. The atmosphere in which it is easiest to teach is the
atmosphere in which it is easiest to learn. The same things that are a
burden to the teacher are a burden also to the child. The same things
which restrict her powers restrict his powers also.” But then she
follows with a cautionary note: “The element of danger in organization
for self-protection is the predominance of the selfish motive. In the
case of teachers a natural check is placed upon this motive by the
necessity for professional organization. The closer the union between
these two kinds of organization, the fuller and more effective is the
activity possible to each.”12
Haley acknowledges the conservative influence of teachers organizing
for their own self-interest, “the selfish motive.” She assumes that the
existence of a professional organization—in her day, the NEA—serves as a
“natural check.” But in teacher unionism’s reemergence in the 1960s,
there was no mass socialist movement as there had been in Haley’s time
to spur engagement in a militant confrontation with capitalism. In
addition, the NEA had morphed into a rival teachers’ union. Hence the
“natural check” on the “selfish motive” no longer existed for either the
AFT or the NEA.
Teacher unionism was reborn as a political force in the 1960s, in the
wake of the civil rights movement’s challenge to U.S. society.
Political battles between white teachers in city schools and black
parents and community activists made teacher unionism, which came to be
personified by Albert Shanker, seem to many left activists and academics
an inevitable opponent of challenges to existing (racist) power
relations. By 1975, Shanker had jettisoned any pretense that teachers
and children had identical interests, arguing instead that public and
union interests converged “occasionally,” making these instances the
“happiest of times.”13
Cohen’s critique, not unusual in the New Left, boiled down to this
argument: the left could not justify white teachers in city schools
fighting for better wages and pensions in school systems that were
failing minority children. As had been true of the movement Haley helped
organize, teacher unionism in its rebirth was blind to systemic racism.
Teachers’ unions accepted the circumscribed limits of contract
unionism, fighting for more voice for teachers within undemocratic
schools and an undemocratic society. In doing so, the unions limited
their capacity to develop respectful alliances with communities of color
who viewed school reform as an extension of the civil rights struggle.
Community activists intent on “owning” the schools had a similar
blindspot, failing to see teacher unionism’s claims for teachers’
dignity as workers.14
While Haley pushed the union and movement she headed to struggle for a
“democracy in education” that excluded people of color, Shanker shaped
the apparatus and movement he headed to the “business union” approach,
defining members’ interests as improved pay and benefits within a status
quo defined by U.S. capitalism’s global desires.15
The political and financial stability of the union apparatus, expressed
in the union leadership’s pursuit of legislation that gave the union’s
agency fee (the right to charge non-members for costs in negotiating and
enforcing the contract) and dues checkoff (having membership and agency
fee deducted from paychecks automatically), was cast as synonymous with
the health of the union and of public education itself.
The embrace by the teachers’ unions of business unionism’s narrow
definition of teachers’ self-interest as workers and teachers has been
self-destructive. It has paved the way for neoliberalism’s ideological
victory in configuring teachers and their unions as a “special
interest,” no different from the corporations entering the education
“market.” Especially in schools serving students who are marginalized in
our society, school organization and regulations can be inhumane.
Partly because contracts severely limit the scope of bargaining and
partly because of the embrace of “business union” thinking, teachers’
unions have pretty much accepted the school’s structure and organization
as a given. The mis-fit between teaching as a personal, nurturing
activity and schools’ hierarchical structures, culture, and organization
(whether due to paternalism, bureaucracy, or a corporate ethos), has a
corrosive impact on teachers’ morale and subsequently students’
learning. Teachers’ unions have a unique role in assuming leadership in
working with parents, community, and labor—in coalitions, as respectful
equals—to take on the way schools are organized. In this we have much to
learn from Haley.
What we should not repeat is teacher unionism’s complicity in
accepting racial oppression as society’s default setting. Tensions with
parents are inescapable, especially when parents feel they are not
respected by the union, as is often the case with groups who have
experienced racial exclusion from labor unions. In cities throughout the
United States, teachers’ unions confront the legacy of their failure to
build authentic alliances with parents and community activists. Their
failure to see beyond “bread and butter”—in particular, their
unwillingness to put race and racism on the table as legitimate concerns
of parents and students—has made them vulnerable to neoliberalism’s
audacious and effective usurpation of the rhetoric of equal educational
opportunity historically associated with progressive movements.

Teaching as Transformative Labor

A good teachers’ union has special moral and political
responsibilities because of the unique nature of teachers’ work. From
the point of view of the capitalist elite, teachers are to be controlled
first and foremost because they are “idea workers,” that is, they play
an ideological role in transmitting—or disrupting—social values and
norms. This is a major reason the neoliberal project intends to remake
teaching by destroying teachers’ autonomy and the space this creates in
schools for critical thought, for ideas of freedom and social justice.16
Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell captures the special nature of
teachers’ work this way: “Teaching is always transformative labour,
bringing new social realities into existence; and is also fundamentally
interactive, not individual. Teachers’ work is not social reproduction,
but is creative and therefore a site of social struggle….
In a long historical perspective, the modern teaching workforce is
unique, and has the possibility of shaping the learning capacities of
the whole society; this may now be uniquely important.”17
Elsewhere Connell explains why the focus on individual teacher
quality is misguided. Teaching, she notes, has to be understood as a
collective effort of those at the school site: “Much of what happens in
the daily life of a school involves the joint labour of the staff, and the staff’s collective relationship to the collective presence of the students…. The task of improving teaching, accordingly, cannot be understood only as a matter of motivating or re-skilling individuals.”18
In setting out the collective nature of teachers’ work, Connell
explains why good teachers’ unions are essential for good schools. In
this respect, teachers’ unions do want what children need, a collective voice for teachers who can defend conditions that support learning and teaching well.
Many teachers do not realize that they need a collective voice, nor
that they are “idea workers” who do “transformative labour.” They enter
the profession because they love being with children or the subject
matter they want to teach. The architects of neoliberalism’s educational
reforms know that regardless of conscious intent, teachers have the
potential to affect social arrangements, challenging the authority of
elites who have an interest in maintaining their power and privilege.
For this reason, a union of teachers has a particular responsibility to
safeguard teachers’ rights to help students think critically. Protecting
teachers’ academic freedom is one of the union’s most essential tasks.
That means fighting for tenure and the guarantee of fair, objective
hearings when complaints are made about teachers’ professional conduct.
What complicates the union’s defense of academic freedom and its
members’ performance on the job is that laws requiring children’s
compulsory attendance at school make them captive in classrooms.
Therefore the union has an allegiance both to its members as
workers and to the protection of students’ well-being. To satisfy its
responsibility, teachers’ unions need to reject the quid pro quo that
gives teachers collective-bargaining rights but limits the scope of
bargaining.
Neoliberalism’s ideological success in equating “effective teaching”
with improving student test scores has made defense of teaching’s civic
and social functions all the more essential—and difficult. The
stranglehold of standardized testing, having test scores linked to
teachers’ pay and evaluations, has turned many schools that serve
children of working and poor families into little more than training
grounds for unemployment, low-wage labor, and prison. Both the AFT and
NEA have capitulated to neoliberalism’s reduction of schooling’s
purposes to its economic value. Yet, we cannot effectively defend
teachers, teaching, and public education against neoliberalism without
defending teaching’s non-economic functions, its role in educating
people to think critically, and its socialization and nurturing
responsibilities. Teaching is “women’s work,” and as Sara Freedman
noted, presciently, improving the status of teaching is not possible “as
long as one of the most important jobs of a teacher—that of
understanding, working with, and emotionally supporting children—has
little status outside of schools.”19
In its report on what students in Chicago deserve, the Chicago
Teachers Union has inherited and improved on Haley’s vision of how
teachers’ unions need to discuss teachers’ work and children’s
well-being.20
While parents are worried about their children’s ability to compete for
jobs, they also look to schools to safeguard their children. It is
parents, not bankers or the politicians they bankroll, who are the
constituency teachers and their unions need to move to our way of
viewing school reform.
Haley’s warning about the “selfish motive” in organizing for
self-protection suggests that teachers’ unions should try to create
vehicles independent of the union, as exist in higher education in
faculty senates, to protect teachers’ rights as “idea workers,” their
ideological function, to develop courses of study, select books,
materials, and teaching methods. Haley’s union supported creation of
“teachers’ councils” that were organizationally independent of the
union. Teachers elected representatives to the councils, which had an
advisory role on educational decisions.21
At the same time, teachers’ unions need to respect the diversity of
opinion among thoughtful teachers and parents about what works best in
classrooms. Teachers who are closer to minority and immigrant
communities can bring information and perspectives that are valuable in
helping children learn.22
Too often the views of parents who lack formal education, especially
when they are members of oppressed groups, are dismissed as being
uninformed, when, in fact, these parents bring a much-needed critique of
unfair and unequal treatment of minority students.23
Conventional (teacher-union) wisdom has it that collective bargaining
improved teachers’ working conditions, and if we define teachers’ work
primarily in terms of wages and hours, that is accurate. But in his
historical examination of the NEA, Wayne Urban concludes that teachers
in NEA affiliates actually had more voice in professional matters before
the NEA engaged in collective bargaining.24
Because of the narrow scope of bargaining that unions accepted when
they pressed for legislation giving teachers the right to bargain,
teachers’ unions are generally precluded from addressing pedagogical
concerns, like standardized testing and choice of teaching materials and
methods.
Teachers and students are being damaged by union contracts that tie
teacher evaluation and pay to standardized test scores—policies now
endorsed by the AFT and NEA. The unions need to push back on teacher
evaluation but cannot do so successfully unless they learn to build
mutually respectful alliances with parents, community, and students. The
unions must also engage in direct action, as Sam Gindin notes when he
calls for a “complete revolution in everything about
public-sector unions—from how they allocate resources, to how they train
their staff and relate to their members, other unions, and the
community, to (above all) making the level, quality and administration
of services a prime bargaining issue.”25
Neoliberalism’s success in painting teachers’ unions as self-interested
and selfish and the attack on the right to bargain contracts make this
an opportune time to rethink the scope of bargaining—and even collective
bargaining. The model of social movement unionism suggests that we need
to understand our goal as being building a social movement of
teachers who defend their professional and economic interests in a
broader social movement to defend public education. The organizational
form we adopt then supports the movement’s aims, rather than vice versa.

Do Teachers Want What Children Need?

Both Cohen’s question and the AFT slogan configure the issue as an either/or, but it should be understood as contingent: When
do teachers and teachers’ unions want what children need? Like all
workers, everywhere, teachers have the right to form unions to bargain
collectively. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that teachers’
rights are hard to defend when unions cast their members’ interests as
being separate from needs of students, parents, and community. While the
union can and should broaden its goals, there is a tension we must
learn to live with. Teachers’ unions are almost never strong enough to
determine the contours of struggles, and especially now when both the
unions and public education are under such sustained, brutal attack,
very often union activists and supporters in the community must confront
hard choices about how long and how hard to fight—and for what. Unions
must be pressed to win parent and community trust and continue to earn
it—while we all recognize that unions are subject to limitations (legal
and internal) that advocacy groups are not.
Yes, teachers do want what children need, most of the time. However,
the vision we should project for our movement—and the slogan we
adopt—must embed the needs of teachers within a vision for democratic,
quality schools and a society that is just.

↩ Stephanie Ross, “Varieties of Social Unionism: Towards a Framework for Comparison,” Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 11 (Autumn 2007), 28, http://justlabour.yorku.ca. The quotes inside Ross’s excerpt are from Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1995), 268.

↩ Margaret Haley, “Why Teachers Should Organize,” in the National Education Association of the United States, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting Held at St. Louis, Missouri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904), 146, http://babel.hathitrust.org.

↩ Weiner, The Future of Our Schools, 104. Originally in “Cracks in Shanker’s Empire,” New Politics 11, no. 4 (1976).

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About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.